Emilie Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History

Profile

Biography

BA, MA, and PhD (York)

Emilie is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her research interests lie in the cultural and religious history of England, and English-speaking people, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is co-director of the international research network ‘Soundscapes in the Early Modern World’.

Research

Overview

Emilie has wide interests in the cultural, religious and sensory history of England, and English-speaking people abroad, from 1500-1700. She has previous and ongoing projects that consider sounds, voice, language and multilingualism, and various aspects of performance culture.

Projects

Emilie’s research to date has focused predominantly on the experiences of post-Reformation English Catholics. Her earliest work considered the multifaceted ways English Catholics used music – defined to include vocal and instrumental sounds, performance, composition, and material culture – to foster confessional identity in the face of persecution. This resulted in several articles on ballad culture, martyrdom and memorialisation. 

Emilie’s other main interests surround travel and mobility. She has previous and forthcoming publications on multilingualism, transnationalism, linguistic encounter, power and identity which all focus on evidence from English nuns in enclosed convents in Catholic Europe. This stemmed from her time on the European Research Council funded project ‘The Reception and Circulation of Women’s Writing, 1550-1700’ at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she remains a Research Associate.

Emilie is currently writing a short monograph on Listening to Early Modern Travel Writing for Cambridge University Press, which brings her longstanding interests in acoustic culture together with her work on mobility and encounter to argue that the epistemic value of sound and listening (real and imagined) was fundamental to early modern travel writing.

Emilie is also working on two further projects, on the reception of the Whole Booke of Psalmes in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, and on sixteenth-century female protestant life-writing and the Bible. She is also in the early stages of a monograph project provisionally dubbed Exiled Lives: English Nuns in Catholic Europe, which will offer a new cultural history of the thousands of women who left England from c.1600-1800 to join exiled English convents newly established on the continent.

Supervision

Emilie welcomes enquiries from anyone considering postgraduate research on any aspect of the religious and/or cultural history of early modern England (and English-speaking people abroad).

She would be particularly interested in enquiries from individuals with projects that consider music and/or the broader soundscape; post-Reformation Catholicism; the senses; women’s writing; travel, mobility and/or exile; linguistic and cross-cultural encounter; martyrdom, and popular culture.

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00085C Knowledge and Belief in World History
• HIS00158I Persecution and Toleration in Early Modern Britain
• HIS001805 Exiled Lives: English Nuns in Catholic Europe, 1600-1800 – Semester 1
• HIS00183H Exiled Lives: English Nuns in Catholic Europe, 1600-1800 – Semester 2